The widespread use of Internet and mobile communications offers new opportunities to combine electronic and printed media and to create “media adaptive” products. The philosophy behind the concept of “media adaptive” product is that information must be transferred to users in a form adapted to their needs. Printed documents and multimedia products are complementary and they must be combined depending on the users needs. To facilitate this evolution, the “electronic content should be accessible directly from the printed medium”.
During the last years, due mainly to the widespread use of personal computers and CD-ROMs and to the universal access of millions of users to the World Wide Web, the “electronic publishing” has veritably exploded. An enormous amount of information, including documents, books and all kinds of publications are now accessible to users of personal computers or specialized e-book readers.
Even if the enthusiasm of the public for computer-based reading has been considered by many analysts as a threat to conventional forms of hard-copied publishing, for most people, reading paper cannot be compared with reading an electronic media (e.g., an e-book by using a MS Reader). Paper is portable, available everywhere, can be easily used and manipulated and provides a high resolution. Most people prefer to read paper, whether they are familiar with computers or not.
Notwithstanding the advances made in computer technology in the field of recording and processing data, the use of paper has not decreased. In fact, people are used to browse through paper catalogs, magazines, newspapers, maps and books, to flip through the pages and to glance at pictures and text. For example, a collection of printed color photographs can be much easily and quickly browsed than a sequence of computer screens. Therefore, paper continues to be the means the most widely used to display information. Moreover, because a paper document is more usable than a computer screen for displaying information, it is obvious that a large portion of the paper accumulation results from the print of electronic documents. Most people perform their daily work (such as meetings, projects, presentations, annotations, corrections) on paper and use printed copies instead of original electronic documents.
In the last years, a new publishing technology named “Printing-on-demand”, has contributed to keep alive this preference for printed documents. Print-on-demand is in fact a new printing technology, and also a new form of information distribution that makes possible the production of very low print runs. It is a production system where just the required number of copies is printed. Unlike so-called “short-run” printing (traditional book printing in small batches (50-100)) for very limited stockholding, print-on-demand enables the printing of a single book in response to a particular customer order. That means that on-demand titles never goes into stock. The ultimate step in print-on-demand, is the production of one copy at a time. This technology dramatically reduces the storage of hard copies and thus reduces the inventories, the distribution costs and the expenses for recycling or destroying unused copies. Moreover this technology enables on-demand reprinting, which means that titles no longer fall “out of print”.
As a conclusion, even if many electronic document systems (e.g., Web browsers, e-books readers) attempt to replace paper by providing new applications such as having access to multimedia information and services, a lot of users still work with paper. Many analysts admit that: “consumers will insist on printing most of their documents” (e.g., e-books, for reading, for browsing, for consulting, for annotating).
Now, when an electronic document is printed, the advantages related to the use of an electronic document disappear. In particular, it is no more possible to edit, select and mark parts of the document, and to copy the selected parts for composing another electronic document. For example, when an electronic document is printed, it becomes impossible for the user to select parts of the printed copy with text or figures and to retrieve the digital information corresponding to the selected parts and to copy this information into another electronic document.
In general terms, there is a real need to provide users with new systems and methods for improving physical copies of electronic documents, (e.g., e-books, Web pages, Lotus Notes, MS Word, Lotus WordPro or Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)). More particularly, there is a real need to provide users with the capability of exporting selected pieces of information printed on physical documents (e.g., figures, tables, references, paragraphs) into electronic documents. In particular, there is a need to select from a physical document, information such as text and figures and to retrieve this information from the electronic copy of this physical document.
For example, a user seating on a public library, may wish to select portions of different printed publications (e.g., some relevant paragraphs, references, and illustrations printed on “Celtic Legends” related books). He may wish to store data identifying said selections on a stand-alone (i.e., not connected to a network) handheld device (e.g., on a handheld computer, or a personal digital assistant). The same user may also wish to download at a later time, from his stand-alone handheld device to a personal computer or workstation connected to Internet, the data identifying the selections he made on the physical documents and to retrieve through the Web and from the electronic copies of the different printed documents, the electronic information comprised in the selected portions.
Therefore, there is a need for new systems and methods to enable a user to compose an electronic document from information directly selected on physical documents.
None of the methods referenced in the prior art describes a system for directly designating and selecting parts of physical documents, and then automatically retrieving the digital information related to the selected portions.